Editorial: Municipalities feeling little pressure to share

Thursday

May 18, 2017 at 12:26 PMMay 18, 2017 at 12:26 PM

Start talking about ways that villages, cities towns and counties can save some money by working together and inevitably you will hear from one official or another that there is an even bigger problem facing taxpayers.

Most of your property tax bills come from school expenses and anybody who wants to have a significant and measurable impact on that bottom line needs to look at education spending.

While that is true, it also is true that the tax cap instituted by the state Legislature several years ago has had a clear and measurable effect on the amount that New Yorkers spend on schools, an amount that continues to be among the highest in the nation with results that are in the middle of the pack or lower.

The cap has effectively kept school budget growth to 2 percent or less following years in which the rise had been much faster. The success on this score is evident in the annual string of complaints from school superintendents and board members when they have to come up with budgets that will stay below the cap. If they were not facing this upper limit, they would be spending more, taxing more.

And while they all are familiar with the experiences in other states, they never manage to follow the examples that show them how they could get better results and spend less. They have been able to rely on the state, with its increasing amount of aid, to provide more money from a broader base of taxes although legislators and the governor have continued to resist the changes necessary to ensure that all students get an education that costs roughly the same.

While all of this is true, it should not be part of the discussion about sharing services among municipalities or taking that concept one large step farther and doing away with some of our tiny governments and merging them into still small but more manageable and much less costly ones.

Now, local government leaders are facing a deadline that is forcing them to talk about saving and sharing although there is not enough of an incentive to do so or much of a punishment for those who do not do much more than go through the motions.

Part of the problem, the one that more or less assures that this exercise in promoting sharing will be as ineffectual as those in the past, comes from voter apathy. Most people have no idea what their village, town, city and county spend on the services they provide and, therefore, have no idea about the more complex question of what they could do to trim the expenses.

The people they elect to run these municipalities do know those figures but know very well that should they try to do some trimming with the inevitable loss of some jobs, they will be hearing very quickly and very loudly from those whose employment will be affected.

Until taxpayers start to match that level of interest, we can assume that this latest attempt to make local governments more efficient and less costly will join previous ones as good ideas that went nowhere.